This clever new feature might tempt you to switch to Firefox

Another innovation, another shot fired in the browser wars

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With the next version of Firefox, Mozilla is planning to introduce a feature that should make the browser run much more smoothly, and it's a move the company is calling the biggest change ever made to Firefox.

It's called Electrolysis (E10S for short) and the feature, which has been in beta testing since December last year, effectively splits Firefox into a UI process and content process. With these two elements being separated, if a web page (the content process) happens to be eating up your CPU resources or crashing, the interface – all the various buttons and your other tabs which are open – will still remain responsive and fully usable.

That's a pretty major boon to say the least, and will save a lot of frustration – there's nothing worse than staring at your browser for 30 seconds solid with it being frozen and everything greyed out as some website churns away.

Stepping things up

Recently, the scale of beta testing Electrolysis has been stepped up, and over the last six weeks it has involved half of the testing population. And in terms of stability as well as the key issue of resource usage, things are apparently looking good.

Firefox 48 (with Electrolysis) will be unleashed to the general surfing population at the beginning of August, or at least that's the plan, but there will be a staged rollout.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler wrote: "This is a huge change for Firefox, the largest we've ever shipped. But don't worry. The Electrolysis team at Mozilla has a release roll-out plan that ensures we're going slowly, measuring as we go and that we can throttle up as well as down depending on what we see."

Apparently only 1% of users will receive Firefox 48 initially so Mozilla can test the waters and make sure everything is okay, before gradually rolling the release out to the rest of the user base.